The FreeBSD Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to supporting the FreeBSD Project. The Foundation gratefully accepts donations from individuals and businesses, using them to fund projects which further the development of the FreeBSD operating system.

Monday, November 24, 2014

In this month’s project update we will take a look at the ongoing FreeBSD 64-bit ARM port. AArch64 is the official name for the 64-bit ARM architecture, but it is also known as ARMv8 and arm64. The 64-bit ARM architecture is expected to find use in traditional server markets, in contrast to the embedded and mobile markets where 32-bit ARM is widely adopted.

The FreeBSD Foundation is collaborating with ARM, Cavium, Semihalf and Andrew Turner to port FreeBSD to arm64. Cavium is contributing directly to the Foundation, supplying engineering expertise and hardware for the development community. Cavium's ThunderX platform provides a great match for FreeBSD’s strength as a server operating system, and it supports up to 48 cores in a single package. ThunderX will be the initial reference target for this project, but ports to other arm64 platforms are expected later on.

The kernel bring-up portion of the project is nearing completion; FreeBSD/arm64 boots to single-user mode on ARM's reference simulator. Work is underway on the remaining kernel drivers, and on userland support.

This project’s overall goal is to bring FreeBSD/arm64 to a Tier-1 status, including release media and prebuilt package sets. More information about the arm64 port can be found on the FreeBSD wiki at https://wiki.freebsd.org/arm64, and the in-progress source tree is available through the FreeBSD Foundation’s GitHub account at https://github.com/FreeBSDFoundation/freebsd.

Monday, November 17, 2014

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce it has received a $1,000,000 donation from Jan Koum, CEO and Co-Founder of WhatsApp. This marks the largest single donation to the Foundation since its inception almost 15 years ago, and serves as another example of someone using FreeBSD to great success and then giving back to the community. Find out more about Jan's reasons for donating below.
We're now in the process of working together as a team to decide how best to use this gift to serve the FreeBSD community. That plan will combine financial investment, to ensure the effects of this donation are felt for many years to come, and an acceleration of the Foundation's growth into new capabilities and services.
FreeBSD has a tremendous impact on our world. Our mission is to increase that impact through educational outreach, advocacy, community support, and technical investments. More information on how we serve each of these areas can be found on our website.
With this donation, and the generosity of all those who have donated this year, we have shattered our 2014, million dollar fundraising goal! But this does not mean we can stop our fundraising efforts. Only by increasing the size and diversity of our donor pool can we ensure a stable and consistent funding stream to support the FreeBSD project.

Please help us continue to grow FreeBSD's reach and impact on our world. Donate today!=================================================

Update: The following contains the full text from Jan's Facebook post on 11/17/2014:

Last week, I donated one million dollars to the FreeBSD Foundation, which supports the open source operating system that has helped millions of programmers pursue their passions and bring their ideas to life.

I’m actually one of those people. I started using FreeBSD in the late 90s, when I didn’t have much money and was living in government housing. In a way, FreeBSD helped lift me out of poverty – one of the main reasons I got a job at Yahoo! is because they were using FreeBSD, and it was my operating system of choice. Years later, when Brian and I set out to build WhatsApp, we used FreeBSD to keep our servers running. We still do.

I’m announcing this donation to shine a light on the good work being done by the FreeBSD Foundation, with the hope that others will also help move this project forward. We’ll all benefit if FreeBSD can continue to give people the same opportunity it gave me – if it can lift more immigrant kids out of poverty, and help more startups build something successful, and even transformative.

Friday, November 14, 2014

FreeBSD 10.1-RELEASE Announcement

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the
availability of FreeBSD 10.1-RELEASE. This is the
second release of the stable/10 branch, which improves
on the stability of FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE and
introduces some new features.

Some of the highlights:

The new console driver, vt(4), has been added.

Support for FreeBSD/i386 guests has been added to
bhyve(4).

The bhyve(4) hypervisor now supports booting from a zfs(8)
filesystem.

Support for SMP was added to the armv6 kernels and
enabled by default in the configuration files for all
platforms that contain multi-core CPUs.

Initial support for UEFI boot has been added for the
FreeBSD/amd64 architecture.

Support has been added to cache geli(8) passphrases during
system boot.

Support for the UDP-Lite protocol (RFC 3828) has been added
to the IPv4 and IPv6 stacks.

The new filesystem automount facility, autofs(5), has been
merged from FreeBSD-CURRENT.

The sshd(8) rc.d(8) startup script now generates ED25519
sshd(8) host keys if keys do not already exist when
ssh_keygen_alg() is invoked.

OpenSSH has been updated to version 6.6p1.

The nc(1) utility has been updated to match the version in
OpenBSD 5.5.

Sendmail has been updated to 8.14.9.

The unbound(8) caching resolver and ldns have been updated
to version 1.4.22.

OpenPAM has been updated to Ourouparia (20140912).

OpenSSL has been updated to version 1.0.1j.

The pkg(8) package management utility has been updated to
version 1.3.8.

For a complete list of new features and known problems, please
see the online release notes and errata list, available at:

Availability

FreeBSD 10.1-RELEASE is now available for the amd64,
i386, ia64, powerpc, powerpc64, sparc64, and armv6
architectures.

FreeBSD 10.1-RELEASE can be installed from bootable
ISO images or over the network. Some architectures also support
installing from a USB memory stick. The required files can be
downloaded via FTP as described in the section below. While
some of the smaller FTP mirrors may not carry all architectures,
they will all generally contain the more common ones such as
amd64 and i386.

SHA256 and MD5 hashes for the release ISO and memory stick
images are included in the PGP-signed version of this announcement, available at:

Additional UEFI-capable images are available for the amd64
(x86_64) architecture.

The purpose of the images provided as part of the release are
as follows:

dvd1

This contains everything necessary to install the base FreeBSD
operating system, the documentation, and a small set of
pre-built packages aimed at getting a graphical workstation
up and running. It also supports booting into a "livefs"
based rescue mode. This should be all you need if you can
burn and use DVD-sized media.

disc1

This contains the base FreeBSD operating system. It also
supports booting into a "livefs" based rescue mode. There
are no pre-built packages.

bootonly

This supports booting a machine using the CDROM drive but
does not contain the installation distribution sets for
installing FreeBSD from the CD itself. You would need to
perform a network based install (e.g., from an FTP server)
after booting from the CD.

memstick

This can be written to an USB memory stick (flash drive)
and used to do an install on machines capable of booting off
USB drives. It also supports booting into a "livefs" based
rescue mode. There are no pre-built packages.

As one example of how to use the memstick image, assuming
the USB drive appears as /dev/da0 on your machine something
like this should work:

This can be written to an USB memory stick (flash drive)
and used to boot a machine, but does not contain the
installation distribution sets on the medium itself, similar
to the bootonly image. It also supports booting into
a "livefs" based rescue mode. There are no pre-built
packages.

As one example of how to use the mini-memstick image,
assuming the USB drive appears as /dev/da0 on your machine
something like this should work:

Support

Other Projects Based on FreeBSD

There are many "third party" Projects based on
FreeBSD. The Projects range from re-packaging FreeBSD into a more
"novice friendly" distribution to making FreeBSD
available on Amazon's EC2 infrastructure. For more information
about these Third Party Projects see:

Fix a race in pmap_emulate_accessed_dirty() that could trigger a EPT misconfiguration VM-exit.

Important note to ZFS users on the i386 architecture: Using multi-disk ZFS configurations on i386 (mirror, raidz-1, raidz-2, etc.) may causea kernel panic on boot.

Adding 'options KSTACK_PAGES=4' to the kernel configuration is observed to resolve the problem. Please *do* *not* upgrade your system with freebsd-update(8) if using a multi-disk ZFS setup, since this will override the kernel configuration with the GENERIC kernel.

Pre-installed virtual machine images for 10.1-RC4 are also available for amd64 and i386 architectures. The images are located here.

The disk images are available in QCOW2, VHD, VMDK, and raw disk image formats. The image download size is approximately 135 MB, which decompress to a 20GB sparse image.

The partition layout is:

512k - freebsd-boot GPT partition type (bootfs GPT label)

1GB - freebsd-swap GPT partition type (swapfs GPT label)

~17GB - freebsd-ufs GPT partition type (rootfs GPT label)

To install packages from the dvd1.iso installer, create and mount the /dist directory:

# mkdir -p /dist# mount -t cd9660 /dev/cd0 /dist

Next, install pkg(8) from the DVD:

# env REPOS_DIR=/dist/packages/repos pkg bootstrap

At this point, pkg-add(8) can be used to install additional packages from the DVD. Please note, the REPOS_DIR environment variable should be used each time using the DVD as the package repository, otherwise conflicts with packages from the upstream mirrors may occur when they are fetched. For example, to install Gnome and Xorg, run:

During this process, freebsd-update(8) may ask the user to help by merging some configuration files or by confirming that the automaticallyperformed merging was done correctly.

# freebsd-update install

The system must be rebooted with the newly installed kernel before continuing.# shutdown -r now

After rebooting, freebsd-update needs to be run again to install the new userland components:

# freebsd-update install
It is recommended to rebuild and install all applications if possible, especially if upgrading from an earlier FreeBSD release, for example,
FreeBSD 9.x. Alternatively, the user can install misc/compat9x and other compatibility libraries, afterwards the system must be rebooted
into the new userland:

# shutdown -r now

Finally, after rebooting, freebsd-update needs to be run again to remove stale files:

# freebsd-update install

Love FreeBSD? Support this and future releases with a donation to the FreeBSD Foundation!